As others have indicated, entering 4-digit hex values definitely would not be my
preferred way of entry for arbitrary Unicode characters. For characters that are
frequently use, I favour the idea of user-definable input methods. I don't
oppose the idea, though, since it *will* get used, by people like Markus, and
probably by me on some occasion. (I have a Word macro that allows me to enter
any Unicode character, which is what I usually end up using when I want to
experiment with arbitrary Unicode characters, but I certainly don't want to
spend the rest of my life limited to that.)

My main concern is with the attempt to "localise" the hexadecimal digits by
allowing A-F to be replaced by characters from other scripts, which is what this
discussion thread started with. (Can anybody tell me what the first six Chinese
characters are?)